Gangaram doctors extract coconut-sized tumour from 72-year-old, save his thyroid gland

Explaining the case, Dr Sangeet Agarwal, Consultant, Head and Neck Onco Surgery, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said that this was a special case as normally the thyroid glands are 3-4 cm long and here a hard tumour like a rock was stuck in them. “I have operated on more than 250 such cases of huge thyroid tumours but this was a unique case in terms of weight and size. The normal butterfly shaped thyroid gland, which normally weighs 10-15 gms and is about 4 cm in size, grew to 18-20 cm, becoming firm and hard like a rock,” he added.

The thyroid gland is located at the base of the neck and releases hormones that control metabolism — the way the body uses energy. The thyroid’s hormones regulate vital body functions, including breathing, managing heart rate, and maintaining body temperature.

Dr Sangeet faced multiple challenges involved in this surgery. “The biggest challenge was to save the voice box of the patient while removing this tumour,” he said. The surgery took about three hours and was performed by the Head and Neck Onco Surgery team led by Dr Sangeet Agarwal who successfully managed to save the Bilateral Vocal Cord Nerves of the patient.

Due to the high vascularity (tumour was filled with multiple blood vessels) of the gland, there were very high chances of blood loss as well. For this, special care was taken to avoid puncturing of these blood vessels. Dr Sangeet added that the trachea (windpipe) was compressed due to which a special technique for anaesthesia had to be applied. “In such types of huge tumours, preservation of calcium and maintaining parathyroid glands was also a big challenge. We were able to successfully preserve all four parathyroid glands,” he said.